Lady Killers Page 2

  Nádasdy wasn’t Erzsébet’s only sparring partner, either. In 1601, a mysterious woman named Anna Darvolya joined their household as Erzsébet’s companion. Locals described her as a “wild beast in female form,” and she was rumored to be a witch. Once she arrived at the castle, Erzsébet’s personality started to change. “The Lady became more cruel,” her servants said. If Nádasdy taught Erzsébet to torture, Darvolya taught Erzsébet to kill.

  “No Butcher Under Heaven Was More Cruel”

  Now and then, servant girls died at the Nádasdy-Báthory household, but it was nothing worth raising a royal eyebrow over. In the eyes of the ruling classes, these young peasants were utterly disposable. After an antifeudalist uprising was squelched in 1514, a new Hungarian legal code called the Tripartitum reduced the rights of peasants and serfs to almost nothing, while protecting the nobles who abused them.

  Erzsébet wasn’t just sheltered by the law; she was above the law. By this point, the king of Hungary had been forced to borrow money from the Báthory-Nádasdys so many times that Erzsébet was basically untouchable. (At the time of Nádasdy’s death, the king owed him almost eighteen thousand gulden, a practically unpayable debt.) Tucked away in her craggy castle on a hill, Erzsébet could do whatever she wanted.

  This isn’t to say nobody noticed anything unpleasant happening to Erzsébet’s servants. Local pastors grew suspicious when Erzsébet kept asking them to perform funeral rites for servant girls who’d died of “cholera” or “unknown and mysterious causes.” At one point, she asked them to bless an oversize coffin, but the pastors balked when they heard a rumor that it contained three dead bodies. The speculations grew so outrageous that one of the pastors dared to pull Countess Báthory aside after a sermon and call her a murderer to her face. “Your Grace should not have so acted because it offends the Lord, and we will be punished if we do not complain to and criticize Your Grace,” he said. “And in order to confirm that my words are true, we need only exhume the body [of the latest dead girl], and you will find that the marks identify the way in which death occurred.”

  The countess hissed that she had relatives who wouldn’t tolerate these shameful accusations, and the pastor responded, “If Your Grace has relatives, then I also have a relative: the Lord God. . . . Let us dig up the bodies, and then we will see what you have done.” Erzsébet stormed out of the church, and eventually Nádasdy managed to appease the pastor. But Nádasdy couldn’t cover for Erzsébet forever.

  The Black Knight died of illness in 1604, when Erzsébet was forty-four years old. Again, servants noticed a change in her. She was growing more and more violent, insatiably so. Maybe it was stress: she was now managing extensive properties without the quick income from the spoils of the Long War. Maybe she was recoiling in horror at the aging process: legend has it she was incredibly vain. Or maybe some sort of latent psychosis, from that infamous Báthory inbreeding, began to rear its head. Either way, what had started as a shared hobby with Nádasdy and Darvolya quickly turned into a full-blown obsession, and Erzsébet became fanatical about torturing and killing young girls. She reaped them from the towns surrounding her various castles—nubile peasant children with strong, expendable bodies—and when she was finished with them, she flung them back over the castle walls to be eaten by wolves.

  As before, Erzsébet didn’t work alone. Along with Anna Darvolya, she gathered a gruesome torture squad: her children’s nurse, Ilona Jó; an old friend of Ilona Jó’s, who went by Dorka; a washerwoman named Katalin; and a disfigured young boy known as Ficzkó. Darvolya, Dorka, and Ilona Jó were the cruelest of the bunch and took pride in their macabre creativity. Ficzkó helped, but he was awfully young. Katalin was the most softhearted; she’d try to sneak food to the broken-down girls, and once she herself was beaten when she refused to participate in the torture.

  It usually started with a servant girl’s mistake. Maybe the girl would miss a stitch, causing the countess to turn on her with a snarl. Erzsébet would begin by slapping, kicking, or punching the servant, but eventually she’d dig deeper, producing some imaginative punishment to satisfy her craving for blood. Those who made sewing mistakes were tortured with needles, while a girl who stole a coin was branded with that same coin. Erzsébet played mind games, pricking the girls’ fingers with pins and saying:, “If it hurts the whore, then she can pull it out.” Then, when the girls pulled out the pins, Erzsébet would cut off their fingers. She’d often strip her servants naked before she beat them, and once bit a chunk out of a girl’s face when she herself was too sick to get out of bed.

  If the torture stopped there, it was a pretty good day for the servant girls, but Erzsébet was rarely satisfied with pinpricks and severed fingers. No matter which castle the countess was staying at, she had a specific torture chamber to play around in, and the brutalities that occurred in them were absolutely appalling. The torture squad would burn the girls with irons or beat them “until their bodies burst.” Once, Erzsébet put her fingers inside a girl’s mouth and tore her face apart. There were also reports of pincers used to rip out the girls’ flesh, and rumors of forced cannibalism. “What outrageous cruelty! No butcher under heaven was, in my opinion, more cruel,” wrote the horrified Csejthe pastor to a friend after learning what happened deep inside Erzsébet’s dungeons. Some members of the torture squad had specialties: Dorka liked to cut the girls’ fingers with shears. Darvolya liked to give them five hundred lashes. And Erzsébet liked it all.

  “Anywhere she went,” confessed Ilona Jó, “she looked immediately for a place where [we] could torture the girls.” A townsman heard from several servant girls that “their mistress could neither eat nor drink if she had not previously seen one of the virgins from amongst her maids killed in a bloody way.” Without death, it seemed, Erzsébet felt incomplete.

  Bloodbath

  Let’s stop here for a moment. Is this all seeming a little too gory to be true? A beautiful countess ripping apart young faces? Murdering virgins? Feeding their flesh to each other? After a certain point, the cataloguing of Erzsébet’s crimes begins to feel farcical. Thanks to the graphic nature of the trial transcripts, the Báthory legend ballooned to ludicrous proportions in the centuries after Erzsébet’s death, and many of the rumors that sprang up involved a potent mix of sex, narcissism, and blood.

  One of the most enduring rumors claims that the countess bathed in the fresh blood of her victims to preserve her beauty forever and ever. The story goes like this: When a servant girl ruined some aspect of Erzsébet’s toilette, Erzsébet slapped the girl so hard that peasant blood spattered across her noble face. After washing off the blood, Erzsébet noticed that her skin looked younger than it had before—perfectly smooth, with that elusive, almost translucent quality she thought she’d never achieve again. She thus became maniacal about soaking in tubs of virginal blood during top-secret 4:00 a.m. baths.

  Unfortunately for the vampire obsessives among us, this is almost certainly not true. None of the servants who testified against Erzsébet mention anything about the countess bathing in blood. In fact, what they do mention is that so much blood was spilled during torture sessions that you could scoop it off the floor, meaning Erzsébet didn’t seem too concerned with saving—much less bathing in—the precious blood that poured from her victims. It turns out the first mention of her blood baths appeared over a century after her death, in a 1729 book called Tragica Historia that was written by a Jesuit scholar after he discovered the Báthory trial transcripts.

  It’s easy to see why the blood bath rumor has persisted, though. Not only is it a compellingly creepy image, but it also solves the distressing idea of a murderess who kills just because she’s a killer. It means we don’t have to worry about the question of evil in the Báthory case. Vanity is a much more palatable explanation for her crimes, because then all that bloodshed simply comes down to a misguided desire to look good for the boys. (Or the girls. Because Erzsébet only killed women—a rarity in the realm of female serial killers—rumors ab
ound that she was doing it out of repressed lesbianism.)

  But be not disappointed at the lack of blood baths. Plenty of blood was shed at chez Erzsébet, so much that the walls were spattered with it. Erzsébet would get so drenched with gore that she occasionally had to stop midtorture and change her shirt. While her affinity for stripping her maids naked may hint at some sort of fetish, and her dealings with Darvolya and the occult may have occasionally focused on preserving her youth, it seemed that what the countess truly liked was pretty straightforward: to absolutely destroy the body.

  The Gynaeceum

  Rumors of Erzsébet’s violence were now flying everywhere, but nobody could do anything about it, because she was still killing peasants, and peasants couldn’t press charges against nobles. Parents would sell their child to Erzsébet for a lump sum, and if the child died of “cholera,” well, that was just too bad. Sure, Erzsébet was now killing so many girls she couldn’t even bury them properly—the shallow graves in her courtyards were sometimes disturbed by dogs—but the countess remained unassailable.

  Then, like many a serial killer after her, she grew reckless, she got messy, and she killed the wrong people.

  By 1609, her cruel collaborator Darvolya was dead of a stroke, and Erzsébet was running out of money. She was now taking advice from her lady steward, Erzsi Majorova, rumored to be a “forest witch”—a local peasant woman familiar with herbalism and the occult.

  Surely by now Erzsébet was half mad with loneliness. Nádasdy and Darvolya were dead. Her children were married and gone. Her confidants were washerwomen, forest witches, and a young boy who barely knew what he was doing. None of these people could understand what it meant to be Erzsébet Báthory: to be powerful and rich and beautiful and aging and cruel, to be the only one in charge of holding her own dark world together. Did Erzsébet have close friends in her social circles? Probably not, given her heavy reliance on peasant women and the fact that she panicked after most social obligations, taking out her anxious energy on the bodies of her servants. Even her violence seems tinged with a terrible isolation. You can’t beat a girl to death in a gloomy torture chamber without flailing your arms in the darkness.

  Anyway, by 1609, Erzsébet decided she needed more money and, supposedly, a source of better, richer blood. The folkloric version of this story says that peasant blood was no longer staving off the countess’s aging, so the forest witch Majorova suggested that the blood of noble girls might be more effective. Really, though, Erzsébet was just running out of people to kill. Parents were beginning to actively hide their daughters from her when she came through town looking for “workers.” Maybe she was also feeling a little bit rash. A little vengeful. There was just one problem: peasants were easy to deal with, but nobles would definitely notice if their daughters went missing.

  So Erzsébet hit on the brilliant idea of pretending to open a finishing school for young women, called a gynaeceum. The fees for this counterfeit gynaeceum would provide Erzsébet with some much-needed liquidity, and the daughters of nobles would provide exactly what she needed them to provide. She didn’t bother thinking this plan through to its logical conclusion—tens of dead girls, powerful parents crazed with worry. She just ushered in a gaggle of aristocratic youngsters and, well, finished them.

  When wealthy parents began inquiring about the state of their offspring, Erzsébet’s bizarre excuse put everyone on edge. She claimed that there were no girls left on the premises because one of the girls had been so jealous of her classmates’ jewelry that she’d murdered every single one of them and then, um, committed suicide.

  Needless to say, the countess wasn’t convincing anyone at this point. In fact, people were beginning to see horrifying evidence of her crimes right in front of them: girls with bruised bodies running errands in town, girls with burned hands scrambling into Erzsébet’s carriage, girls with disfigured faces walking dejectedly in the countess’s entourage, and even a girl who escaped from the castle and ran into town with a knife still quivering in her foot.

  And now noble blood had been shed and noble families were crying out. This was enough for the king, Mátyás, to move against Erzsébet.

  “Send, Oh Send Forth, You Clouds, 90 Cats!”

  In February 1610, the king ordered his palatine, György Thurzó, to begin an investigation against Countess Báthory.

  Awkwardly for both Thurzó and Erzsébet, Thurzó had been one of Ferenc Nádasdy’s best friends. The two were so close, in fact, that when Nádasdy was on his deathbed, he asked Thurzó to protect his wife. And now Thurzó was being asked to shake all the skeletons from her closet. But he was a loyal subject of the king, so he forged ahead with the investigation, determined to uncover the truth while still treating Erzsébet as fairly as possible.

  Hundreds of people affirmed the rumors of Erzsébet’s terrible violence, placing the number of dead girls around 175 or 200. They spoke of seeing bloodstains on the walls, of hearing screams and the sound of beatings. None of the people Thurzó spoke to were actual eyewitnesses, but many of them had seen the high number of burials taking place around the castle and had noticed that certain parts of Erzsébet’s estates were always guarded carefully.

  Convinced that Erzsébet was guilty, but torn about his promise to her dead husband, Thurzó wrote to Erzsébet’s son and sons-in-law, asking for their advice. The men reached a secret decision: Thurzó could investigate the crimes, as long as he promised Erzsébet would never be brought to trial. She could be locked up, and her servants could be interrogated, but her family wanted to avoid the spectacle of having their mad countess take the stand. It’s telling that Erzsébet’s children didn’t bother to insist she was innocent. “Public punishment would shame us all,” wrote her son-in-law.

  By December, Thurzó was almost ready to act, but before he could arrest such a powerful woman, he had to be completely certain she was guilty. So he invited himself and the king over to her castle for a Christmas Eve dinner. Erzsébet acted like a gracious hostess, but she was barely holding it together, and ended the night by serving the men a mysterious gray cake she’d cooked up with her forest witch, Majorova. The cake was shaped like a pretzel and had a communion wafer in the center. Once the men tasted it, they became sick—and, convinced she was trying to poison them, left right away.

  On New Year’s Eve 1610, an increasingly paranoid Erzsébet met Majorova outside the manor house of Castle Csejthe to watch the movements of the stars and clouds. They were planning to cast a spell for protection and asked a scribe to write it down. When Majorova was satisfied that the conditions were right, the women began to chant.

  “Help, oh help, you clouds!” they cried. “Help, clouds, give health, give Erzsébet Báthory health! Send, oh send forth, you clouds, 90 cats!” The cats were instructed to destroy Thurzó and the king and anyone else trying to bring the countess grief. Unbeknownst to the countess, however, Thurzó was hiding in the darkness around Castle Csejthe at that very moment, determined to catch her in the bloody act.

  Once Erzsébet went back inside, Thurzó crept toward the manor, accompanied by a party of armed guards. Right away, they stumbled across the body of a mutilated girl near the entryway, and found two more girls dying right inside the doors. The sound of screaming led the men to one of the torture chambers, where they caught the torture squad at work.

  It’s unclear if Thurzó actually caught the countess herself in the act, or simply discovered her henchpeople, but he was finally satisfied as to her guilt. Erzsébet was dragged to the castle proper and forced to watch the rest of the search, which revealed even more girls “hidden away where this damned woman prepared these future martyrs.” As the men moved through the dark halls, Erzsébet cried that she was innocent, and that all this violence was the fault of her servants. The next day, she was formally imprisoned in the dungeons of her own castle—dungeons that had held her victims’ bodies only hours before.

  A Wild Animal

  A grand total of 306 people testified agains
t the Blood Countess, including the members of her torture squad, who were now being tortured themselves. Their testimonies were beyond incriminating.

  “The Lady beat and tortured the girls so much that she was covered in blood,” said Ilona Jó.

  “They were taken to be tortured even ten times in a day, like sheep,” said Ficzkó.

  No one knows for sure how many girls Erzsébet Báthory killed. Her four accomplices claimed the number of dead girls fell between 30 and 50—and they’d know best, for obvious reasons—while the staff at another one of Erzsébet’s castles said she’d killed 175 to 200 girls. The king heard through the grapevine that she’d killed 300, and one young witness claimed the countess had murdered as many as 650 girls and kept their names written in a little ledger.

  Ilona Jó, Dorka, and Ficzkó all received the death sentence. Since Ilona Jó and Dorka had been personally responsible for so many “serious, ongoing atrocities perpetuated against Christian blood,” their fingers were torn out by heated iron tongs before they were executed and thrown into a huge bonfire. Because of his youth, Ficzkó was given a slightly more merciful sentence: beheaded and then burned. Katalin, the most unwilling of the accomplices, was thrown into jail.

  As promised, Erzsébet was never taken to trial, but instead condemned to lifelong imprisonment in her own blood-drenched castle. Several pastors visited her there and found her furious and unrepentant. When they asked her to think about how much suffering she had inflicted on others, Erzsébet merely snarled that her powerful relatives would soon come and save her. She maintained that Ilona Jó, Dorka, Ficzkó, and Katalin were the guilty ones—and when the pastors asked her why she hadn’t commanded her servants to simply stop torturing, Erzsébet responded that she herself was afraid of them. At another point, she hissed that she wouldn’t confess a thing, even if they tortured her with fire.